Hello again and welcome to our monthly roundup of the most interesting news in the world of business messaging. So much has happened this month, so let’s just dive right into the news.
New Smishing Threat — TangleBot
We’ve previously written on our blog about the FluBot smishing threat and another new challenger for the malware crown has emerged recently — TangleBot. It’s been so named as it hides its malicious intent behind so many layers of obfuscation and is able to control almost all the functions of an Android smartphone.
The first infection is often triggered by an SMS containing a link to a site that tells you that your installation of Adobe Flash Player is out of date. If you follow the instructions on the site, you’ll install the TangleBot malware. Similar to FluBot, TangleBot will overlay banking, financial or cryptocurrency apps and steal your login credentials by recording the details used to login.
CPaaS Becoming Big Business — $10b in 2022
Juniper Research published a study earlier this month on the global value of CPaaS services and is predicting that by 2022 the market will exceed $10 billion for the first time, rising from $8.6 billion this year for a 17% year on year growth.
The research also identified that one of the key differentiators for CPaaS providers is going to be the development of CDPs (customer data platforms), which provide enterprises with actionable insights into users’ preferences and desires.
Rich Messaging is also predicted to be a revenue generator. Currently RCS and OTT business is only 2% of CPaaS revenue but Juniper believes it will rise to over 20% in just 5 years.
GMS sees the potential in CPaaS for our industry and our customers and is excited for the big changes to the industry that it is likely to bring.
Mobile Services on the Rise in CIS
Covid-19 has had a profound effect on the digitisation of the world and particularly the CIS region. In 2020 the CIS region had 238 million mobile subscribers with 70% of those residing in Russia and Ukraine. There’s still a lot of room for growth in underserved markets like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, however.
In this report from GSMA they talk about the changes seen over the past year and predictions for the future. In particular they are predicting almost a 12% increase in the economic value of the mobile technologies and services industry by 2025, taking the industry from $143b to $160b.
4G mobile broadband is on the rise with 4G establishing itself as the leading mobile technology in the region, though in 2025 GSMA predicts that the CIS region will have 30m 5G connections, around 8% of the market.
WhatsApp Multi-Device Support
Earlier this month WhatsApp launched multi-device messaging for a small select number of users. While WhatsApp users have been able to login to their messages on a browser or desktop app for a while, each account could only have one instance. Now with the new beta, their users can stay logged in across multiple devices without having to repair whenever they switch computers. This could be especially useful for users who have WhatsApp running on their phone, a personal laptop and a work laptop for example.
One of us at the GMS content team has been testing out the multi-device beta. We are happy to report that it works mostly well. When going back to a device for the first time in a while there will be a 10-20 second load while that device catches up with the state of the account in the cloud. After the initial load the synchronisation across all devices is instantaneous.